1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of distributed storage systems and, in particular, to a system and method for distributing and accessing files in a distributed storage system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Existing distributed storage systems are designed to depend on specific types of hardware for the storage, requiring homogeneous hardware to simplify administration and configuration of the system. Some storage systems rely on a centralized server or designated control servers to monitor the distributed storage systems, to configure new storage servers, and to propagate updates to the storage servers. Still other storage systems use heterogeneous hardware and require heterogeneous software, such as client-server systems that use the glusterFS storage platform. Many of the existing distributed storage systems cannot be easily scaled up or down in size and have significant administrative costs due to the complexity of reconfiguring the system.
As the foregoing illustrates, there is a need in the art for an improved distributed storage systems that can be easily scaled up or down in size and do not rely on a centralized server to configure or reconfigure the distributed storage system. Additionally, it is desirable to use identical software on all of the hardware in the distributed storage system.